Episode 7: Half-Hanged
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Anyone looking to watch a hanging in Edinburgh in the 18th century need only travel to the Grassmarket, the open marketplace near Edinburgh Castle that hosted the city’s public executions for hundreds of years. From Covenanters to criminals to mob lynchings, the site saw the deaths of hundreds of people over its centuries of use. But none were so famous as Margaret Dickson, who was sentenced to death on the first Wednesday in September, 1724, hanged from a gibbet in the Grassmarket, pronounced dead—and then woke up a few hours later complaining of a sore neck. She was scorned in street ballads and cheap printed broadsides, only to be celebrated in verse in our own time. She was known as “Half-Hanged Maggie.” Welcome to Rime, where we’re roping you in with tales from the history of poetry. I’m your host, MJ Millington.
Sir Walter Scott described the Grassmarket gibbet in his 1818 novel The Heart of Midlothian. The “huge black gallows-tree towards the eastern end of the Grassmarket...was of great height, with a scaffold surrounding it, and a double ladder placed against it, for the ascent of the unhappy criminal and the executioner. As this apparatus was always arranged before dawn, it seemed as if the gallows had grown out of the earth in the course of one night....On the night after the execution the gallows again disappeared, and was conveyed in silence and darkness to the place where it was usually deposited.” It’s an ominous and strangely organic image–the idea of the gallows growing up in the dark like some kind of night-blooming flower, only to fade again into the earth after its gruesome work was done.
The design of the Grassmarket gibbet–that of a simple elevated beam with ladders propped against it–was common for its time; a variation on a theme of judicial hanging that had existed in Britain for almost 1500 years, said to have been brought with the Saxons. The executioner would have used a method of hanging now known as “short drop,” where the hanged person experiences little to no vertical drop in the time between being noosed and actually hanging by the neck. It was not until the 1870s that the “long drop” method was revolutionized in Britain. This is the method more familiar to us today, where the convicted are noosed on a long length of rope, a trapdoor opens under their feet, and they drop through the platform. Along with the specific placement of the knot in the noose, the long drop method involves a calculation based on each individual’s height and weight, to ascertain the length of rope required to achieve the correct vertical force to break the person’s neck and sever the spinal cord, ideally causing instant death.
The short drop method, on the other hand, does not break the neck, or even injure it badly; nor does it kill instantly. If a ladder was used, as with the Grassmarket gibbet, the convict was simply pushed off to swing sideways under the beam. If a horse and cart were used, as at the infamous Tyburn gallows, then the convict would stand in the cart under the gallows-beam, the noose would be placed around their neck, and then the horse would be walked out from under the gallows, leaving the person swinging as the cart pulled away. There are many variations on the short drop itself, but death came usually through the constriction of the vagus nerves, carotid arteries, or jugular veins, which reduced the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain, or by asphyxiation due to the slow constriction or obstruction of the trachea as the weight of the person’s body pulled against the rope around their neck. Historical accounts often mention that the hangman helped things along by pulling on the person’s legs. Yet, for all that, more people survived being hanged than you might think; and none more famously than Maggie Dickson.
Maggie Dickson was only in her early twenties when she found herself the “unhappy criminal” ascending the ladder of the Grassmarket gibbet, having been sentenced to death for alleged infanticide, after concealing an illegitimate pregnancy. (She could have almost been the model for Walter Scott’s character Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, herself sentenced to death for the same reason.) Few real facts survive about Maggie’s circumstances, but she was born around 1701, and was from the town of Musselburgh, a few miles east of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth. She lived there with her fisherman husband and their children, until his long absence from the home. Sources disagree about the reason: possibly he was press-ganged, forced into naval service against his will; or he took on work with board elsewhere; or perhaps he simply abandoned his family. During her husband’s absence, Maggie found herself with child by another man. The punishment for this, in the strict Presbyterian kirk atmosphere of the time, was a period of community-wide, church-sanctioned ritual shaming, and her reputation ruined for life. This would have had an immediate and devastating effect on her economic circumstances, as no one would hire a shamed woman. She would have been left penniless, without the means to provide for her family, especially in her husband’s absence. So Maggie did what many Scottish women did when they found themselves in similar circumstances—not wanting to volunteer herself for prolonged public shaming and economic ruin, she concealed her pregnancy, and when her labor came she did not call anyone to help her. Maggie later insisted to church authorities that her child had been stillborn; and that in her distress she had kept the corpse with her for a week, before slipping the tiny body into the Tweed River. But according to the laws of Scottish church and state, her concealment of the pregnancy was tantamount to murder.
The 1690 Act Anent Murthering of Children is short but staggering. “If any Woman shall conceal her being with Child, during the whole space, and shall not call for, and make use of Help and Assistance in the Birth, the Child being found dead, or amissing, the Mother shall be holden and repute the Murtherer of her own Child ... tho there be no Appearance of Wound or Bruise upon the Body of the Child.” In other words, if a woman hid the fact that she was pregnant with an illegitimate child, and that child died in childbirth or was stillborn, then the mother was legally guilty of murder, despite the fact that the child would not have lived anyway. This is the law that Maggie Dickson was tried under; and the sentence for murder was death by hanging.
And the lead-up to Maggie’s hanging is where the flourishing 18th-century broadside industry kicks in. Broadsides were the quick and cheap news and entertainment of the day, with local printers throughout Britain and the continent churning out news items, poems, ballads, and more, all to feed the hunger of a public ravenous for stories, action and true crime. Murderer, monster, abomination, unnatural–these are some of the words that Maggie’s detractors used to describe her in print, seeming to revel in descriptions of her wickness and sin. A broadside poem entitled “A Warning to the Wicked, or, Margaret Dickson's Welcome to the Gibbet,” says “Ignorance, the Source of all our Evil,/ Made her a faithful Factor to the Devil :/ For when the Heart's not bolted against Sin,/ It lets the Devil and Damnation in.” There’s nothing like rhyming verse to really make the condemnation memorable.
Meanwhile, heaven forbid the kirk and other local authorities should be left out of the shame game. Local authorities published so-called “confessions” on behalf of convicted women that bewail at length, supposedly in the voice of the accused, the breadth and depth of their sin. But let’s not forget that these broadsides were published by local churches and other institutions that had an investment in reinforcing their own authority as punishing bodies, as well as justifying the punishments they brought down. And how clever to do it by putting words of guilt and culpability into the mouths of the women themselves–although I imagine these confessions were popular more for the details of crime interspersed throughout, than for the very long-winded penitence of the women concerned. They are often signed by witnesses to the supposed confession. Then by the accused’s name a letter X or other sign, and the words “her mark,” a signal to us that the woman purportedly making this confession was illiterate, and could only make a mark where someone told her to, not even able to sign her own name, let alone read the words she was made to mark as her own.
And if she was unable to sign her own name, as in Maggie Dickson’s case, then she was certainly unable to write the very taxing five-page confession that I read so that you, Dear Listener, don’t have to. Maggie’s confession says that she was abandoned by her husband when she already had several children; that she was very possibly acquaintance raped by one William Bell, the son of the landlord where she was living; and that she told the father of the child several times that she was pregnant, but she received no help from him, and so told no one else. The confession says that she concealed the pregnancy, but that the child was stillborn. All that covers about one paragraph’s worth, surrounded by four long pages of run-on sentences about what an egregious sinner she is, and how she should have heeded better when the church spent her entire life trying to tell her that. It’s unclear how much of the confession is truly in Maggie’s own words; perhaps the factual account was padded out with penitence by the authorities? Or perhaps the witness was led? Regardless, what it never says is that she was guilty of killing her child. She never confessed to that, either here or at her trial. All she admits to was hiding her pregnancy; unfortunately, due to the laws at the time, that was enough to make her a murderer.
A month after Maggie was sentenced to death, the Caledonian Mercury for September 3, 1724 gave an account of her hanging: “Yesterday Margaret Dickson suffered in the Grass-market, pursuant to the sentence emitted against her for the murder of her own child. She was cut down some time after thrown over, and put into a bier, in order to be transported to Musselburgh, to be buried with her people.” However, it wasn’t until a week later that the full story emerged in print, though it was already the talk of the town. The Caledonian Mercury reported on September 8th that “After this unfortunate creature had been cut down by the executioner, and put into a cart to be carried to Musselburgh there to be interred; on the way thither, the people who attended the corpse, stopping some time at Pepper mill to refresh themselves, were alarmed by one in the company, who affirm’d that he felt some motion in the chest; whereupon it was immediately broke up by her friends...” She was bled and given some spirits, and then carried to Musselburgh, and was “so far recovered … that she both sate [sic] up and spoke to the company.” Another account says that her coffin was disturbed when a group of medical students began to fight her friends for possession of her corpse; the corpses of criminals being the only bodies legally available to medical students for dissection at the time. The ensuing brawl damaged the coffin enough to let some air in; and that, along with the jostling motion of the cart on the rutted dirt roads, helped to revive the not-so-dead woman, who promptly complained of a sore neck.
An interesting aside here is that because Maggie was legally declared dead, her sentence–to be hanged by the neck until dead–was considered served under Scottish law. Had the same situation happened in England at the time, she would simply have been hanged again. But Maggie was a free woman after her death; with sudden fame, not to mention infamy, and a bit of money because of it. She remarried her husband (from whom death had parted her legally, if not corporeally), and they went on to have several more children together. Maggie lived at least 30 more years after her hanging; and the sensational story of her death and revival has become an Edinburgh legend. Even today Maggie Dickson’s Pub stands in the Grassmarket, serving up whiskey and ale to tourists overlooking the scene of her execution.
Back in 1724, the broadside press was again on hand to make the most of Maggie’s restoration. A number of verse ballads were published, but I’ve not found any that expressed the opinion that her revival was miraculous, or some kind of natural justice that proved she wasn’t really guilty–nothing like that. Instead the responses fall right in line with the narrative of her abominable wickedness: the murderess who slipped the noose, but who’ll surely get hers one day, even if it’s the Judgment Day. “Tho' she surviv'd the executing Cord,” says one ballad, “She can't survive the Justice of our Lord.” The ballads take a very skeptical view of Maggie’s potential for any sort of life-altering change of heart or behavior. And not content to leave Maggie’s judgment to God, the ballads make sure to air their own judgments here and now, for all to hear, and to cast their aspersions upon her accordingly. Because despite her revival, it must of course be made clear to the public that the judgment brought against Maggie by the authorities of the day was unimpeachably right and just. Her revival can’t really be a miracle, because that might suggest that the sentence against her was wrong, or that God’s mercy supersedes man’s judgment, thus voiding that judgment. The verse broadside “Margaret Dickson's Penetential [sic] Confession,” again written as if in Maggie’s own voice, goes as far as to say, “Before the Justice Seat soon was I born, / Where lives no Fraud, nor Witness are subborn;” which is comically transparent, and almost makes me expect to find a statement at the bottom saying “This ballad paid for by the Justice Seat.” The ballad goes on to say that if only Maggie had died that day, her soul truly could have gone to be with God in heaven:
Had it' but pleas'd my Great, Almighty Maker,
To take my Soul when finish'd was the Creature,
Into his High, Celestial Courts above,
Then I'd been blest with his Almighty Love;
At his Tribunal then could I appear
With joyful Face, nor shed a sinful Tear …
as if her earthly death sentence was somehow equal to god’s grace, and the church authorities of the time had given her a gift that she promptly wasted, the slattern. But since she had the temerity to live, there was no way she was going to heaven now: “... My Life, I hope, shou'd ended been in Glory,” the poem continues, “And not relaps'd to a more fatal Story; / But all of new my Crimes I do repeat, / Nor thinks upon the Terrors of my Fate.” The ballads seem to be part of a programmatic effort to take back what their publishers must have seen as dangerous and unmerited power from a woman who had been granted an unearned reprieve from Death.
Others posited a more sinister reason for her survival. In keeping with the idea that as a murderess she was already in league with the Devil, some of them called her a witch. Alexander Pennecuik [“Pennycook”], an Edinburgh merchant and prolific broadside poet who died in 1730, wrote several poems about Maggie Dickson and her thwarted hangman John Dalgleish. Pennecuik himself was no saint; he receives the following brief description in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “All that is known of him indicates that, though a man of education and some wit, his career was dissipated and impoverished.” He was a bit of a wastrel, and seems to have been in and out of debtor’s prison much of his life. Like many a witty wastrel, though, he does go for humor in his verse. He even uses the same poetic trope as the contemporary authorities, the so-called confession or last words; but in stark contrast to the moralizing and judgmental tone of the kirk-approved broadsides, Pennecuik likes to employ a bit of satire. In his poem “The Last Speech and Dying Words of John Dalgleish, Hangman of Edinburgh,” he has Maggie’s hangman confide to the listener that, as his end drew near, he tried to bargain with Death to just give him a “flegg”–a scare–rather than end his life:
'Death, I've ae favour for to begg,
That ye wad only ge a flegg,
And spare my life,
As I did to ill hanged Megg,
That graceless wife.'
Pennecuik has Dalgleish taking credit for sparing Maggie’s life; though of course a failed hanging isn’t exactly a recommendation of the hangman’s abilities. Pennecuik complements the hangman’s poem with that of the hanged–his “Epilogue to Meg Dickson’s Loup from the Ladder” might well have been written before the hanging itself, if not the day of, as it makes no mention of the surprising turn of events that followed several hours later. The poem is a convict’s-eye-view, so to speak, and purports to be Maggie’s final words in the moment she begins to dangle from the rope.
Epilogue to Meg Dickson’s Loup from the Ladder Alexander Pennecuik
The judges me condemned have,
And hither I am brought;
I am not like to get reprieve,
But truly I am hought.
And now I’m on the ladder set,
And hangie’s standing by;
No mercy I am like to get,
Now I must surely die.
Just now my one foot’s turned out,
My other soon will follow,
Then hangman John gave out the shout,
The de’il confound the fellow.
And now I’m waving in the wind,
And from the world hurry’d;
Good people take a care behind,
For now by Jove I’m worry’d.
Pennecuik also has Maggie speak about the events of her own execution in the poem “The Merry Wives of Musselburgh’s Welcome to Meg Dickson,” which was probably written around 1727. The premise of the poem is that a group of witches–the “merry wives”–decide to intervene in Maggie’s hanging, make it seem like she’s dead, then spirit her body away to Musselburgh to join the other witches in league with Old Nick. “Whan drunken Maggie’s hanging there,” the witches say, “Not for to help her were unfair.” Maggie tells the other witches of her ill-treatment before the hanging, and despite the fact that her survival has been attributed to witchcraft, still a fairly dangerous accusation to be laid with in 1724, the words she speaks are far more natural than the high penitential melodrama conveyed in other broadsides:
Quoth Meg, when in yon cursed spot,
Where never saul can win a groat,
Nane of them came to wet my throat
Wi’ pint or gill;
I could not make a better o’t,
I pray’d my fill.
…
I thought, for a’ the law they had,
Really the men had a’ gane mad,
To make a poor thing’s heart sae sad
As they made me;
And put a life out, which I wad
They cannot gie.
Of her escape from the noose, Pennecuik writes: “Quo Meg, let me my story tell, / Soon as I frae the gallows fell, / I came awa’ in a cockle shell… / ‘Tis better in Musselburgh to dwell / Nor a cauld grave.” Better to be a witch than dead. And as to the method of her escape–coming away in a cockle shell–witches were known to be able to travel in egg shells and sea shells, sailing in them like boats on sea or air. Reginald Scot, in his skeptic’s treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in 1584, relayed a long list of what witches were supposed to be able to do, according to traditional and classical sources. Accordingly, they could “saile in an egge shell, a cockle or muscle shell, through and under the tempestuous seas.” So Maggie seems to have transformed into a witch the moment she came down from the gallows, whether or not she was one before. And since she’s a proper witch now, the poem ends with Maggie renouncing any penitent thoughts or prayers or bargaining with God she might have done as she hung from the gibbet: “I dinna mind a word I spake / When in the teather.”
A more modern example of a poem about a half-hanged woman is Margaret Atwood’s “Half-Hanged Mary,” published in 1995. It’s about the attempted hanging of Mary Webster, a Puritan and resident of Hadley, Massachusetts. In 1683 she was accused of witchcraft by a neighbor, Phillip Smith, who blamed his ill-health on her; she was brought to trial, examined by a jury, and acquitted. Her accuser’s health grew worse, however, so residents of Hadley took matters into their own hands. Thomas Hutchinson wrote of the incident in his 1764 History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay: “While [Philip Smith] lay ill, a number of brisk lads tried an experiment upon the old woman. Having dragged her out of the house, they hung her up until she was near dead, let her down, rolled her sometime in the snow, and at last buried her in it, and there left her; but it happened that she survived, and the melancholy man died.” The brisk lads and their experiment had failed. Atwood’s poem, which opens with the lines “Rumour was loose in the air, / hunting for some neck to land on,” spends the long night with Mary Webster as she hangs from the rope. Despite the modernity of the poem, the trope is familiar to us–it’s yet another of the confessional/last words variety, but this time, instead of bewailing her own sin and unworthiness as the 18th century poems would have it, Atwood’s Mary Webster thinks thoughts of which any late-20th-century feminist author would approve:
Trussed hands, rag in my mouth,
a flag raised to salute the moon,
old bone-faced goddess, old original,
who once took blood in return for food.
The men of the town stalk homeward,
excited by their show of hate,
their own evil turned inside out like a glove,
and me wearing it.
Atwood’s poem ends with a similar conclusion to Pennecuik’s, more than 250 years later–that the hanging created the witch. “Before, I was not a witch,” Mary Webster says, “But now I am one.” Also once again a poet is keen to tell the story of the subject, putting their own words in the mouth of someone else. Across the historical expanse the utterances are quite different: but each time the poet had an agenda–a reason to make the subject speak as they did. With Maggie Dickson I found myself frustrated by the cacophony of voices chiming in to speak for her, and wish that her own words had survived. Even the quip that is famously part of her story–that she woke up after having been hanged complaining of a sore neck–is apocryphal.
It wasn’t until I found Gerda Stevenson’s poem “Hauf-hingit Maggie,” from her collection Quines: Poems in tribute to women of Scotland, that I realized that most of the verse I’d read that purported to be in Maggie Dickson’s voice wasn’t even in her own language: Scots. Pennecuik’s “Merry Wives of Musselburgh” comes closest–though even then the poem uses more of a hybrid English/Scots that I imagine was aimed at a particular kind of reader. It’s English peppered with Scots, rather than being fully written in the Scots language. Stevenson’s poem, on the other hand, is fully in and of Maggie’s own language, instead of the imposed, authority-sponsored English of the broadside ballads:
Daith is wappin whan it comes – like birth;
I ken – I hae warstled throu, an focht wi baith.
She wis blue, ma bairn, blue as the breist o a bird
I seen oan the banks o the Tweed thon day; then grey,
aa wrang, the naelstring windit ticht aroon her neck …
The whole poem is gorgeous, and well-worth listening to Stevenson read in her own voice, which I’ve included in the notes for this episode on the Rime website. And it revealed to me what ended up being one of the unexpected themes of this episode: the idea of women’s voices, and giving women words to speak as if they were their own, and how poets and poetry throughout time have used real people as mouthpieces to suit their own ends. Maggy Dickson’s actual voice, her true thoughts on the matter of her execution and revival, even her guilt or innocence–it’s all just a guess. It’s not so easy to put words into the mouths of the wealthy or educated people of history, who took pains to leave records for posterity. But an impoverished, illiterate, female laborer in 18th-century Scotland–well, we can make her say whatever we want.
The empathetic powers of poetry, of writing, of imagination, are greater than we think: for those willing to make an effort to get at the real woman, to allow her to voice her own experience, a storyteller can give us an insight into the past that's otherwise unavailable in the historical record. Not every writer or poet is interested in the complications of what other people truly thought, however; especially figures from the past, who often would have disagreed with, or been insulted by, the very thing the writer is making them say. Atwood’s “Half-hanged Mary” makes no effort to find Mary Webster’s actual voice; it is the poet’s voice only, placed into the mouth of a historical person, reflecting the poet's then-contemporary views. That’s not necessarily a bad thing–poetry is also a tool, and the poet can use it how they like. But it is worth pointing out that Atwood’s poem is not truly trying to uncover what that very real Mary Webster actually thought and felt; but instead, in a kind of revisionist ventriloquism, is using a historical person as a mouthpiece for late 20th-century feminism. It’s the kind of thing that could too easily lead to a gagging or a choking, rather than a hanging, if the poet is not careful. A different kind of silencing, in fact. And is it so different than what the balladeers did to Maggie Dickson, when they spoke her confession for her, spoke the words they thought she should be saying?
Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. The theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. Special thanks this episode to my dear friend Larry Martins, who introduced me to Half-Hanged Maggy Dickson and set this whole episode rolling. And thanks to you for listening! Make sure to visit the Rime website at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll find complete shownotes for this and every episode, as well as links to my own poetry and visual work. And if you enjoy Rime, please leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, to help potential listeners find the stories we’re telling here. Until next time!
Sources
Nota Bene: Maggie Dickson’s trial records are housed at the National Records of Scotland. They have not been published, but the catalog number for Maggie’s original 18th century Justiciary Court records, including her indictment papers, is JC3/12/115-174.
http://catalogue.nrscotland.gov.uk/nrsonlinecatalogue/details.aspx?reference=JC3%2f12&st=1&tc=y&tl=n&tn=n&tp=n&k=&ko=a&r=jc3&ro=s&df=&dt=&di=y
Atwood, Margaret. “Half-Hanged Mary.” Morning in the Burned House. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995.
Full text of poem also available at: https://allpoetry.com/poem/15757257-Half-Hanged-Mary-by-Margaret-Atwood
Clark, Richard. “The evolution of the short drop method of hanging.” Capital Punishment U.K.
http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/short%20drop.html
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http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/half_hanged.html
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Dickson, Margaret. The last speech, confession and warning, of Margaret Dickson, who was execute in the Grass-Mercat of Edinburgh, for the unnatural murder of her own child, on Wednesday the 2d of September 1724. Printed by Robert Brown in the middle of Forresters-Wynd, 1724. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CB0126595990/ECCO?u=22516&sid=bookmark-ECCO&xid=72c03b81&pg=1
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Hochstrasser, Tabea. “She who is stepping from Time into endless Eternity: The social function of Scottish ‘last speeches’ on infanticide concerning women (1650-1800).” 2018. University of Leuven, Master of Arts in History. De Vlaamse Scriptiebank.
https://www.scriptiebank.be/sites/default/files/thesis/2018-09/Thesis%20Hochstrasser%20Tabea.pdf
MacPherson, Hamish. “Back in the Day: The legend of Half-hangit Maggie Dickson.” The National (online edition), News section. 30th August 2020.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/18685609.back-day-legend-half-hangit-maggie-dickson/
“Margaret Dickson's penetential confession.” [Probably printed in Edinburgh, 1724.]
https://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=14556
Mead, Rebecca. “Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia.” The New Yorker online edition. April 10, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-the-prophet-of-dystopia
Milne, Emma. “Concealment of Birth: Time to Repeal a 200-Year-Old ‘Convenient Stop-Gap’?” Feminist Legal Studies. Vol. 27, 2019. p. 139–162. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-019-09401-6
Nash, David and Anne-Marie Kilday. “The Shame and Fame of ‘Half-Hangit Maggie’: Attitudes to the Child Murderer in Early Modern Scotland.” In Cultures of Shame: Exploring Crime and Morality in Britain 1600–1900. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 47-67.
“Particulars of the Life, Trial, Character, and Behaviour of MARGARET DICKSON…” Derby: Wilkins, printer. 1813.
https://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=16830
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https://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=15309
Pennecuik, Alexander. “Epilogue to Meg Dickson’s Loup from the Ladder.” A collection of Scots poems on several occasions, by The Late Mr Alexander Pennecuik, gent. and others. Printed for Alex. Buchanan, Bookseller, above the Cross, MDCCLXXXVII. [1787]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=ECCO&u=29002&id=GALE|CW0111162849&v=2.1&it=r&sid=bookmark-ECCO&asid=a48c9550
Pennecuik, Alexander. “The Merry Wives of Musselburgh’s welcome to Meg Dickson.” A collection of Scots poems on several occasions, by The Late Mr Alexander Pennecuik, gent. and others. Printed for Alex. Buchanan, Bookseller, above the Cross, MDCCLXXXVII. [1787]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=ECCO&u=29002&id=GALE|CW0111162849&v=2.1&it=r&sid=bookmark-ECCO&asid=a48c9550
Reginald Scot. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. London: William Brome, 1584. Reprinted by John Rodker, 1930. page 6.
https://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/macbeth/witchcraft/Scot6.html
Stevenson, Gerda. “Hauf-Hingit Maggie.” Quines: poems in tribute to the women of Scotland. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2018.
Full text of the poem: https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/view/id/4920
Gerda performing the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prIkufZugA0
“A Warning to the Wicked, or, Margaret Dickson's Welcome to the Gibbet.” [Probably printed in Edinburgh, 1724.]
https://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=15756
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